Memoirs & Coffee library book group will discuss Maya Angelou’s memoir entitled Mom & Me & Mom on Tuesday, May 27, at 10:30 a.m. in the Community Room. Ms. Angelou writes a deeply personal memoir of the mother/daughter relationship, starting with the point when her own mother sent a very young Maya and her brother to live with a grandmother. Natural feelings of abandonment and loss become tempered by a growing sense of respect and love for her mother over the … Continue reading →

Saturday Crafters, a monthly craft program run by Bernardsville Public Library, will hold its next meeting on Saturday, May 17, at 3 p.m. Teens or adults are welcome to join others who enjoy doing various handwork techniques. This could be your opportunity to complete an unfinished project, start something new or just get creative ideas, all while spending a pleasant afternoon in the library’s Community Room. At past meetings, members have practiced rug hooking, needlepoint, jewelry-making, crochet, rug weaving, paper arts, embroidery and … Continue reading →

Bernardsville Public Library continues to offer the free, online language-learning resource, Mango, which has recently been upgraded to Mango Connect. This user-friendly portal offers improved graphics and is considered to be a more intuitive way to learn a language. Mango Connect offers a base of more than 50 foreign languages from which to chose, including Bengali, Scottish Gaelic, and Tagalog. In addition, non-English speakers may learn English with instruction in one of 17 native languages. Another feature of Mango Connect … Continue reading →

Susanna Sonnenberg’s 2013 memoir, She Matters: A Life in Friendships, will be discussed by the library’s book group, Memoirs & Coffee, on Tuesday, April 22, at 10:30 a.m. The group will meet in the Community Room for their discussion led by Pat Kennedy-Grant. Copies of the book are now available at the front desk. Publisher’s Weekly writes that Sonnenberg’s book is a “tribute to her lifelong fortress of friendship” and that “her strikingly honest depictions of tumultuous female alliances and … Continue reading →

Thanks to the dedicated work of some Bernardsville Public Library volunteers, a large trove of Somerset Hills family histories, artifacts, photographs, and books have been preserved in the library’s Edwin S. Spinning Local History Room. Significant collections in the Local History Room include the Fred Pitney Crater negatives from the early 20th century. Hundreds of these negatives have now been scanned and are viewable on our website. These negatives document town life in the early 1900’s and include … Continue reading →

Memoirs and Coffee book group will discuss Justin St. Germain’s memoir Son of a Gun on Tuesday, March 25, at 10:30 a.m. in the Community Room. Memoirs and Coffee is one of two library book groups which meet once a month. The other book group, Saturday Samplers, reads assorted literature, short stories and nonfiction and meets on a Saturday afternoon. Both book groups welcome new members. For more information about Son of a Gun, please refer to our catalog entry here. Copies … Continue reading →

Bernardsville Public Library continues to provide complimentary tax assistance to community residents through the VITA program. VITA stands for Volunteer Income Tax Assistance, and this service has been offered free of charge for over 15 years at our library. Volunteers are trained to assist with state and federal tax preparation as well as to help with estimated taxes and the filing of tax extensions. We are especially pleased to offer translation for Spanish language speakers who request this service. Free … Continue reading →

When the United States initiated its space program, two things were certain; men would fly the spacecrafts and their wives back home would “be” the perfect spouses that an adoring public expected. The Astronaut Wives Club by Lily Koppel tells the personal stories of the wives of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts as these women formed a complicated bond of friendship and mutual support for over fifty years. Library Journal notes that the author has created “an exceptional story … Continue reading →

Bernardsville Public Library is pleased to offer its members free access to thousands of feature films, award-winning short films and documentaries. Our library website now provides Bernardsville Library patrons the opportunity to sign up for free viewing access to IndieFlix, an online video streaming service. With IndieFlix, our patrons can even watch foreign language films from over 50 countries! These films may be viewed on computers, smartphones, tablets or on Roku, xBox and Apple TV. Simply create an IndieFlix account with … Continue reading →

Members of Saturday Samplers, a Bernardsville Library book discussion group, are currently reading two works of fiction by author Julie Otsuka for their upcoming meeting on Saturday, Feb. 1, at 3:30 p.m. Ms. Otsuka’s first novel, When the Emperor Was Divine, will be discussed in tandem with her more recent book, The Buddha in the Attic, published in 2012. Both novels describe significant aspects of the Japanese-American experience. The Buddha in the Attic presents the point of view of Japanese … Continue reading →